schneiderism

I have posted about the sun previously (here and here), but the images I came across today at The Big Picture stopped me in my tracks. Simply amazing. We’re seeing the surface of the sun, our sun, the surface of a star. Images like above, which captures a massive solar flare, and images like this:

This shows the magnetic structures of the sun and was taken by the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope in the H-alpha wavelength back in 2003. Do yourself a favor and go to The Big Picture and see these images in larger scale (or at least click on them here to see them larger). They’re stunning. I mean, check this out:

You are seeing the roiling, molten surface in detail, the bubble shaped objects packed tight are called “granules”. The dark shape in the upper left is an irregularly shaped sunspot. These are all amazing to me, but then there is the coronal mass ejection as it projects over a billion tons of matter into space at over a million kilometers per hour:

I am wide-eyed. That is all.